“I believe in great American novels, but not the Great American Novel. This is a Great American Novel: exquisitely lush language of the natural world; startlingly vivid characters; a global understanding of social context, in a particular place; and, in this case, steel-wire narrative tension stringing through the beautiful prose like piano wire. It is the book this year that I feel every American should read, because of its greatness and also because of its deep wrestling with issues of class, complacency, climate change, culture, and especially gender.”

Indie Next authors talk about their books...

“I ran away, but I returned, and I will continue to tell its story. It’s natural that I write about it because this is the best place I know.” Watch Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk in this interview about his relationship with Istanbul – now and then.

“We are living at the edge of Europe with aspirations to be modern and European.” Pamuk, who has spent his whole life in Istanbul, feels that it is a privilege to have witnessed how the city has grown in the span of a lifetime. However, he didn’t become conscious of being a so-called ‘Istanbul-writer’ before he was around 45 years old. Being born into a Westernized middle-class family, he initially wrote mainly about that class, but slowly more and more of the city and its inhabitants have found their way into his books. Nevertheless, Pamuk is clear that he does not embellish the city: “It’s like my body. It’s like our families. Our relationship. What’s given to us by God. My history. I don’t glamorize it.”

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